Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

  It isn’t willpower, but emotions, that can be spent

  When we consider the radish test from such a perspective of emotions, it, too, can be seen in a different light. In front of you are chocolate chip cookies that smell good, but you’re told that those aren’t something that you can eat. Wouldn’t you feel like you aren’t being respected and simply become sad? Hadn’t it actually been this emotion that was affected in the radish test, and not willpower?

  There will be times when you’re busy with your work and have simple meals consisting of items that you buy at a convenience store. You should have been able to preserve your willpower as you haven’t done any complicated cooking, yet you’re somehow left with a sense of melancholy. Isn’t it because of the feeling that you aren’t treating yourself well, rather than an issue with the flavor of the food? I think women are able to paint their nails and vigorously engage in making themselves beautiful, despite the need for willpower to do these tedious things, because they’re boosting their self-esteem by taking care of themselves.

  It’s the same for me when I make an effort to clean up more often when I’m busy. People’s homes get messy when they’re busy, and that’s because they tend to think, “I don’t have the time to do something like that!” But my feeling is that it’s actually more effective to tackle your tasks after cleaning house. Our willpower increases because we feel good that we’ve tidied up.

  We can wait for our marshmallows if we’re feeling good

  The results from the marshmallow test also varied depending on the emotions that people experienced at the time. Children who were told to “think of something fun while they wait” were able to wait three times longer. On the other hand, children who were told to think about something sad could no longer wait at all.

  There’s also an experiment conducted by psychologist Tim Edwards-Hart. He formed two groups and showed the subjects one of two films before putting them to work:

  A.A happy film

  B.A sad film

  Work efficiency improved by more than 20 percent for the subjects in group A. It appears that it isn’t just for show that the film company Pixar has a slide at their offices, or that the offices at Google are colorful, full of toys, and almost like a nursery school for adults.

  A hot system and a cool system

  “Not doing” something will generate negative emotions and uncertainties, and it will also stop people from becoming motivated, which is another ongoing challenge. Why is it that such an awful vicious circle awaits us? In order to understand that, we need to take a look at our brain. The brain is structured like an onion, where the new parts that have been generated through evolution wrap around the old, primitive parts. And many researchers believe that the brain has two systems:

  1.Instinctive. It’s reflexive, and the speed is fast; a system that determines things through emotions and intuition. Corresponds to the limbic system, the striatum, and the amygdala: the “old brain.”

  2.Rational. The response speed is slower, and it won’t work unless there’s an awareness of something. A system that enables thinking, the imagination, and planning. Corresponds to the frontal lobe, or the “new brain.”

  While there are various names for these two systems, I would like to follow Walter Mischel from the marshmallow test and call them the following:

  (1) the “hot system” and (2) the “cool system”

  It’s a little complicated, but I think it’s easy to understand if you can envision the following types of images:

  1.The hot system is hot because you’re driven by your emotions or desires (“Yay! A marshmallow! I’m going to eat it!”).

  2.The cool system calmly analyzes and deals with something (“Okay, so I get a bigger reward later on if I don’t eat this …”).

  With the hot system and the cool system, one won’t function as strongly if the other is activated. They’re constantly interacting with and supplementing each other.

  Stress can make the hot system can go wild

  Our instinctive hot system becomes active when we feel negative or have uncertain thoughts. As I said earlier, a lot of our body systems are holdovers from ancient times.

  The majority of the causes of stress at that time had to have been whether or not we could find food. So it must have been an effective way to cope with stress by eating the food in front of us, and resting whenever we could.

  But today, we aren’t going to be in a critical condition, like not being able to obtain food, just because we’ve felt a little stress at work. Yet our main strategies against stress remain unchanged.

  Our instinct kicks in: It seems rational to take in more calories or to escape from things that we don’t like. It’s possible to explain the reason why we eat or drink too much or become unable to take on our next challenge in the following way:

  Cooling off using our cool system

  Our cool system keeps our hot system from running wild.

  Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re walking down the street on a rainy day, and a speeding car drives through a puddle and splashes you. Anyone is bound to get upset or shout at the driver. That’s a response due to our hot system. But it can be controlled by our “cognition” or our “conscious mind,” which is handled by our cool system. Cognition is to see reality not exactly as it stands, but to look at it in a somewhat different way.

  “Maybe there was a pregnant woman in the car who had suddenly started having labor pains, and so they were rushing her to the hospital.”

  You can appease your anger when you think like that. Walter Mischel called this “cooling” the hot system. That’s what it means for the cool system and the hot system to interact.

  Is willpower a talent that we’re born with?

  It’s my second question that most concerns me with regard to the marshmallow test. Seeing as everything from a person’s performance in school to his or her state of health could be predicted by the test results, the question is whether willpower is really determined by the age of four or five.

  According to Mischel, the majority of the children who were able to wait fifteen minutes and receive two marshmallows demonstrated excellent willpower for decades to follow. But that’s “the majority” of them, and there were also subjects whose abilities became reduced. There were also children who immediately ate their marshmallows who grew able to control themselves as they got older. It’s something that gives us hope.

  Change your environment and your willpower will change

  What I want you to be aware of is that when the criteria change, the results from the marshmallow test will change significantly:

  •Subjects were able to wait twice as long when marshmallows were shown on a projector instead of using real marshmallows.

  •Subjects who had not been able to wait could wait ten times longer when the marshmallows were hidden under a tray.

  In other words, simply by removing the real marshmallows in front of them, the subjects were able to wait longer. The children who had been able to wait in the initial experiment sang, made funny faces, played the piano, or closed their eyes and went to sleep. They knew how to divert their thoughts from the marshmallows in front of them. On the other hand, the children who continued to stare at the marshmallows in front of them generally failed.

  Isn’t it an issue of the number of times that they were seduced?

  How about this: maybe the children who couldn’t wait in the marshmallow test failed not because they had weak willpower, but because they were simply seduced more often by the marshmallows.

  The children who couldn’t wait and went ahead and ate the marshmallows right away had been staring at the sweets. It means they had been imagining the taste of the sweet, plump marshmallows over and over as they waited, and ended up being seduced.

  And in fact, the children who were instructed to “think about the marshmallows as they waited” were only able to wait for short periods.

  Dopamine does bad things to us

>   Failure ensues when you continue to look at the marshmallows.

  This is because of the “bad things” that dopamine does to us.

  The general understanding of dopamine is that it’s a neurotransmitter that’s released when we experience a pleasant sensation. It’s released when we eat something tasty, obtain money, or have sex with the person that we love. That’s why people take action to seek those pleasures. That’s one way to explain what it is, but the mechanism of dopamine is a little more complicated.

  Neurologist Wolfram Schultz conducted an experiment in which he gave various rewards to monkeys. The striatum, the part of the brain where dopamine is concentrated, rapidly fired when a drop of fruit juice was dropped on the monkeys’ tongues.

  But when light signals were shown to the monkeys before they were given the juice, the dopamine began to be released not in response to the juice, but rather to the light. Dopamine began to correspond not to the action itself, but rather to the “sign” of what to expect.

  It’s the same with people, and I think it applies to various cases.

  Don’t people get most excited about social media like Facebook or Twitter not when they’re checking their messages, but when they receive a notification?

  Don’t we most feel like drinking beer not because we’re attracted to the beer itself, but when we’re seduced by the sounds of a can being popped open or the chug-chug of it being poured into a glass?

  Consider also the following experiment: when rats are given a drug that obstructs dopamine, they won’t eat, and they’ll starve to death. Because the desire for something doesn’t occur when dopamine is obstructed, the rats didn’t attempt to eat, no matter how hungry they were or what tasty foods were available in front of them.

  In this way, dopamine generates the desire, and it serves as motivation that leads to action. We take action because we want something; if there is no dopamine released, we won’t want something, and naturally, no action will be taken.

  “Awareness” is a skill you can learn later

  Of course, the children who couldn’t control themselves and ended up eating the marshmallows in front of them were sure to have eaten marshmallows before. That’s why, simply by looking at the marshmallows placed in front of them, they could imagine the sweetness and the gooey texture of the marshmallows and recreate the sensation of eating them. The dopamine got to work, and a desire to eat was generated that prompted them to act. It’s no wonder that, faced with such temptation, they eventually became unable to control themselves.

  Subjects were able to wait twice as long when they imagined that the marshmallows were clouds.

  So, in order to forgo the marshmallows, the thing to do is to not be seduced in the first place. To do that, the children who resisted temptation used the “cognitive” power of their cool system, which told them how to interpret the reality in front of them.

  •They were able to wait twice as long when they were advised to think of the marshmallows as “fluffy, circular clouds.”

  •They were able to wait for an average of eighteen minutes when advised to think that the marshmallows “weren’t real.”

  The children were able to wait simply by changing their perception of the marshmallows. The mechanism of the dopamine to motivate them became weaker, and I’m sure that they were far less seduced than they had previously been.

  The children who weren’t told anything by the researchers but were able to wait anyway had good intuition to divert their attention from the marshmallows to begin with. I’m sure that they had excellent cognitive capacities in their cool system.

  By offering tips on this cognitive ability, the researchers were able to help children who may have otherwise struggled put the skill into practice. What that means is that it’s a skill that can be acquired.

  The cool system will also lie

  Thinking of marshmallows as circular clouds or as fake is a high-level working of cognition through the cool system. In my opinion, if there’s anything that can be developed, it’s this cognitive capacity, and not something vague like willpower.

  But there are some children who used this cool system effectively in order to “cheat.” That’s because the cool system is also a structure that reasons, calculates, and plans.

  One child ate only the inside of a marshmallow and left the outside part to make it look like it hadn’t been eaten. Another broke apart a cookie, licked the cream filling, and put it back together. These were children who ingeniously used the cool system to obtain the reward in front of them.

  It’s also the cool system at work when you think to yourself that although you want to lose weight and you aren’t hungry, you eat “because you might get hungry later on,” or come up with an excuse like “today is a day to celebrate” and indulge yourself, or tell yourself that it’s okay because you “abstained yesterday and the day before that, and this is a reward.”

  A detailed plan to commit a crime, like in the film Ocean’s Eleven, has to be because of the cool system, too.

  Willpower isn’t reliable, as it will always be affected by emotion. And the cool system can also be manipulated. It makes you wonder if we’re at a dead end. What, then, should we do?

  A person with strong willpower isn’t tempted in the first place

  What will serve as a reference here is an experiment that was conducted in Germany that looked into the amount of temptation that people were subjected to in a day. More than two hundred subjects were made to wear beepers, which rang at random seven times a day. The subjects reported on the types of desires they felt when the beepers rang and a short while before that. The results suggest that they were fighting against some type of temptation for at least four hours every day. Fighting the desire to sleep longer, knowing that they had to get up; having to work against the desire to go out and play; fighting the temptation of a food that looked delicious. People are subjected to a similar type of desire as “I want to eat the marshmallows in front of me!” for a considerable amount of time each day.

  This experiment also showed that people who were believed to have strong willpower experienced shorter periods of desire. It wasn’t that they had a strong will that enabled them to repeatedly overcome temptation; they were being seduced less often to begin with.

  To worry is to call up awareness

  The ability to report on a conflict that we’re feeling, like the study participants did whenever their beepers rang, means we’re clearly aware of a challenge and wondering what to do about it.

  When I run a marathon, I can run without being aware of it when things are going well.

  Marathon runner Arata Fujiwara even goes so far as to say, “I’m asleep for the first thirty kilometers.” It’s probably like a state of meditation.

  But this won’t apply if your knees start to hurt.

  There will be more occasions when your conscious mind is called up: “How many more kilometers are there? Still ten more kilometers to go?” “Should I retire now?” “How many more kilometers? What? I’ve only run five hundred meters from that last time I thought about this?”

  The reason time seems to go by more slowly when a task becomes a struggle is because you start to think about the time more often.

  I’m writing this book at the library. I forget about the time when things are going well. It’s what’s called a state of “flow.”

  But when my logic doesn’t connect or I get stuck in writing my manuscript, I start to think about stopping my writing. There was a time when I used an app to count the number of times that happened, and I usually left the library when it happened around ten times and I could no longer bear it.

  Decision-making is as irrational as flipping coins

  There are many aspects of the human decision-making process that are extremely irrational in the first place. As an example, let’s say that we’ll toss a coin now. I want you to make a bet on the outcome.

  You were probably able to decide right away whether you wanted to bet on heads
or tails. But it’s hard to explain when we’re asked, “Why did you make that decision?” Although you’re definitely the one who made that decision, you don’t really know the reasoning behind it. When you get lost, you can tentatively choose which way to go without a particular reason.

  Isn’t it the same thing with the issue of whether or not to eat that marshmallow?

  Mischel described seeing, over and over again in the marshmallow test, the children who couldn’t control themselves suddenly reaching out to ring the bell, then looking away with anguished expressions, as if they couldn’t believe what they’d done. It seems that while the actions during those times were without a doubt actions that the children had chosen to take on their own, it appeared to some degree not to have been of their own choice.

  Habits are actions that we take with barely a thought

  I think that being seduced by the marshmallows is like flipping a coin. One side of the coin says: “Don’t eat the marshmallow; wait,” and the other, “Eat the marshmallow.” We should be able to wait several times if we’re lucky. But the more times we toss the coin, we’ll eventually end up doing something that we don’t consciously want to do.

  It isn’t because of weak willpower that we can’t wait for our marshmallows. It’s simply because we flip the coin many times. Maybe the solution, then, is to not toss the coin—or in other words, to not call up our awareness.